A quadruple weeknote! Travel got in the way of the planned #632-633 double weeknote, then the following week was Easter prep and deadlines. Here we are covering the last four exciting weeks!
Week #632
This was a busy week wrapping-up tasks for the Hyperion project deadlines. We also took a last minute trip to San Francisco for the GDC conference. Flying to San Francisco takes 15+ hours, plus travel time to and from the airport. That makes for a long, long day!
The ongoing staff survey is in the final weeks. The response rate is in a good place and it will be down to the participating companies to push it over the line.
Week #633
We continued this week on the west coast with a few additional meetings in LA, then back to SF before ending the week flying back to Reykjavik. Traveling west-to-east certainly takes its toll with jet lag.
Week #634
This week we’re back in the office, back on mandatory behind the scenes tasks. The VSK tax returns are due. We took an afternoon to get everything in order of the last 3 months of receipts and all our travel expenses and invoices.
One project will launch soon and it is hosted on Heroku. We’ve been doing some load tests to try and estimate what sort of traffic we can handle versus expect and how we should scale our infrastructure.
This is Easter week which means several public holidays in Iceland. That makes the week shorter and kills the motivation for longer focused work.
Week #635
The next eight weeks in Iceland have 5 public holidays creating a constant start-stop feeling at work. Monday was a public Easter holiday here in Iceland, next week Thursday is the First Day of Summer. This week we have been not taking on anything that’s going to required several consecutive days of focus.
We started our High School student survey by sending out emails and SMSes to all the participants. They are slowing answering and we have a good schedule to stay on top of the response rate.
We also finished-up the Hyperion project. The last of the possible edits before the deadline are now done. That’s out the door in a very anti-climatic way. Partly because it won’t officially launch for a few more weeks, but also because we’re straight into support, non-tech tasks and prepping for updates post-launch. What exactly our role will be is yet to be hammered out.
After a lot of traveling in week #632 & #633 and holidays in #634, we’re just about back on top of all the boring company stuff: taxes, finances, accountants, invoices and more. Things are in OK shape, but best to make some minor course adjustments now rather than trying to fix things once there’s massive inertia.
While traveling, we took the opportunity to hammer out one of the tasks while folks were face-to-face. The Gauntlet project is our next potential undertaking. We’re learning from various other project mistakes and made a very long document of what this DOESN’T DO to really keep things in focus. We also had some time this week and after hours of thinking about this and doodling on paper we made the jump to a real, clickable prototype. That’s made a big difference in seeing all little things we forgot, like how to get backwards and forwards between screens and clear selections. All the interactive things you forget about when it is static, analog images. After this next big deadline, we’re ready to pitch this project to the rest of the team. Given our laser focus and working prototype, we hope others will immediately see the value and get as excited as we are.
Fluxcapacitor
Week #215-216 was in 02015. In that article we mentioned Amazon Dash Buttons – remember those?
In late 02010, we wrote a predictions article for 02011. This was originally for a Portuguese Technology magazine, but we mis-understood the brief, but it worked out fine in the end.
In 02009, we wrote about 2× paper a way to get twice as much information density onto a single sheet of paper. This came about because during University exam time, students were allowed to bring in a single sheet of paper and we tried to figure out how to push the possibilities!